On February 6, 2025, Meta announced the launch of the Language Technology Partner Program in collaboration with UNESCO, aimed at enhancing AI-driven speech recognition and translation.

In response to past criticisms regarding its handling of non-English content, Meta is committed to improving its translation and moderation technologies.

Meta encourages contributions to these benchmark translations to establish a comprehensive multilingual machine translation standard.

The company has faced scrutiny for failing to adequately address misinformation in languages such as Italian and Spanish during the COVID pandemic.

This initiative seeks to address the challenges faced by languages that are underrepresented in current AI technologies, promoting linguistic diversity.

Partners in the program, including the Government of Nunavut, will contribute speech recordings, transcriptions, and translated text to improve AI models, particularly for Inuit languages.

The program aims to collect over 10 hours of speech recordings, large amounts of written text, and translated sentences in various languages, supported by a benchmark created by linguists.

To bolster its AI capabilities, Meta is investing significantly in technology, aiming to have over 1.3 million GPUs by the end of 2025.

Recent advancements include the Meta Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project, which expanded speech recognition to over 1,100 languages and introduced zero-shot transcription capabilities.

Meta is also enhancing its AI assistant to support more languages and is testing automatic translation features for Instagram Reels creators.

Applications for the Language Technology Partner Program will remain open until March 7, 2025, with follow-up discussions planned by April 15, 2025.

While these initiatives are presented as philanthropic, they also position Meta to gain improved translation capabilities, benefiting its broader AI strategy.